Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Really this raised many things. The cost of the cloud computing vs private computing. Also this sheds important light at your security at the cloud. I do not want to force my opinions so will leave you with the article. Enjoy!!!

As of today, Amazon EC2 is providing what they call "Cluster GPU Instances": An instance in the Amazon cloud that provides you with the power of two NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs. The exact specifications look like this:

This just shows one more time that SHA1 for password hashing is deprecated - You really don't want to use it anymore! Instead, use something like scrypt or PBKDF2! Just imagine a whole cluster of this machines (Which is now easy to do for anybody thanks to Amazon) cracking passwords for you, pretty comfortable Large scaling password cracking for everybody!

If I find the time, I'll write a tool which uses the AWS-API to launch on-demand password-cracking instances with a preconfigured AMI. Stay tuned either via RSS or via Twitter.

Installation Instructions:

I used the "Cluster Instances HVM CentOS 5.5 (AMI Id: ami-aa30c7c3)" machine image as provided by Amazon (I choosed the image because it was the only one with CUDA support built in.) and selected "Cluster GPU (cg1.4xlarge, 22GB)" as the instance type. After launching the instance and SSHing into it, you can continue by installing the cracker: